I’ve been reading your blogs for the past 8-years.
Question: do you not have income concerns / pressures?
Please take this question from a positive place but it seems like you’ve been able to sustain years of relatively low pay (especially since you’re a father now) without concern.
I’m not sure most people can endure as long as you have and it makes me wonder if you have supplemental income not accounted for.
Not asking you to share anything you don’t feel comfortable with … and your transparency over the years has hugely influenced my thinking on should I start my own business.
> Question: do you not have income concerns / pressures?
Yes, definitely. I am a bit worried about not being able to get back to $100k+/yr in income, and I'm less confident that the safety net of "just go back to FAANG" is still available.
> I’m not sure most people can endure as long as you have and it makes me wonder if you have supplemental income not accounted for.
I do. We have investments that provide additional income. We also live in Western Massachusetts, in an area where living costs are fairly low, so we fortunately don't need to draw down much from our investments to get by.
I'd love to learn more about your process of the sale. And in your graphs, is that attributed to profit/revenue in 2024?
I'm on a super similar journey. Started in 2022, did about 400k in revenue in 2025 at 79% margin, we'll se how this year goes. Theres a world where i'd love to add a lot of scale, but that'll rely on some experiments (underway) panning out. It's 'failure' in most peoples books but 2x'ing would be great too?!
How did you find a buyer? How did you come to a sale price? Why didn't you keep going?
> I'm on a super similar journey. Started in 2022, did about 400k in revenue in 2025 at 79% margin, we'll se how this year goes. Theres a world where i'd love to add a lot of scale, but that'll rely on some experiments (underway) panning out. It's 'failure' in most peoples books but 2x'ing would be great too?!
Nice, congrats!
Yeah, I think depending on what bubble you're in, bootstrapping to 400k and 2x'ing every few years is either failure or amazing. The VC/hypergrowth path doesn't appeal to me, so I think something that gives you $100k+/yr in profit is a huge success.
> I'd love to learn more about your process of the sale.
Sure, I wrote a couple of posts with the details.[0, 1]
Thanks for the reply. Just to clarify the picture for me, was the 2024 jump in profit attributing the sale or was that just a solid year?
Agreed on the 2x every year or two being a weird failure state. I've done both, and I'm at a junction point right now, but I really think a huge part of going all in on the VC route is finding the right money to work with. I've been mostly technical, hidden in dark places all my life. I love having the chance to be customer facing, i love the business side of my work, but doing that with the wrong backers is so unappealing i'd rather not have their money.
I'm curious about your book journey. Sounds like having a big audience and pre-existing list really helps! How did you go about building that audience and list, and what helped the most to doing that? Which lists / audience converted the most for your book offer, and how did you promote or otherwise let folks know about your book? What was the compelling ask to pre-order a book? And, how do you plan to publish the book? Lots of book questions
> Sounds like having a big audience and pre-existing list really helps!
I didn't have a particularly big audience. I had about 2k mailing list subscribers on my main blog, but a pretty small percentage of them purchased. And I had something like 600 subscribers for the book because I've been saying I'd write it since 2021, but all I had was a mailing list.
> How did you go about building that audience and list, and what helped the most to doing that?
I haven't been focused on growing the list that much.
My main goal right now is to get feedback from readers and use it to improve the book. Once the book is done and I can't think of ways to improve it, I'll probably switch to focusing more on finding more places to find paying readers.
> Which lists / audience converted the most for your book offer
I find the most paying readers from HN, actually. I don't think it's the most in terms of conversion percentage, but it's the most in absolute terms because HN is so big. And then there are secondary effects of something doing well on HN because people share the link on other, smaller sites and social media.
> how did you promote or otherwise let folks know about your book?
The thing that's always worked best for me is writing blog posts that I hope my target audience will find interesting. So the thing that's worked for the book is adapting parts of the book to standalone blog posts and sharing those online.[0] A few of those posts did well on HN because I tried to make them interesting to developers interested in writing/blogging.[1]
> What was the compelling ask to pre-order a book?
Haha, maybe I should craft that more. It's mainly that they get to read more of whatever samples they've already hopefully found useful.
My pitch for early access is that early readers get to read it and ask me questions and help shape the book.
> And, how do you plan to publish the book?
I'm already publishing it as a PDF/epub that I sell through Stripe.
I might eventually do a print run or sell Amazon, but I hate dealing with Amazon and physical products, so I'd have to be really confident it would have a big impact on sales.
I'm currently a solo bootstrapped founder, have done short stints in the past - 1 year in 2022, then became cofounder of a funded startup for a year. Now doing it again.
Question is how you stay motivated to keep at it - looks like it took about 4 years before you made similar to your Google salary, did family pressure or external pressure ever impact you? Or is it mainly just keep your eyes on the longer term goal?
I'm also quite lucky that I was aiming for lean-FIRE before I left Facebook, so I have the luxury of being able to keep at it, but sometimes it is demotivating seeing peers / others.
> Question is how you stay motivated to keep at it - looks like it took about 4 years before you made similar to your Google salary, did family pressure or external pressure ever impact you? Or is it mainly just keep your eyes on the longer term goal?
I found it helpful to go in with low expectations.
I was listening to a lot of podcasts about bootstrapping while I was still at Google in 2017-2018, and even the big success stories usually had 5+ years of failing or succeeding only marginally. So, I went in with the expectation that I'd probably fail for the first 5 years, and so there wasn't that feeling of disappointment from not earning much the first few years.
I also had a lot of lucky conditions that made it easy to take the risk at the time, including no family to support, lots of savings, low expenses.
> I'm also quite lucky that I was aiming for lean-FIRE before I left Facebook, so I have the luxury of being able to keep at it, but sometimes it is demotivating seeing peers / others.
Yeah, honestly I do sometimes think, "Wow, if I'd stayed at Google and kept getting that comp (which was about 50% equity IIRC), that would be a lot of money." But I also am very pleased with my life now, and I know I wouldn't have enjoyed my job nearly as much for the last 8 years had I stayed an employee. And that's a huge amount of my life to not do what I'd like to do.
> How do you see the solo bootstrapping landscape going forward? In what ways do you see agentic coding changing things?
It's hard to say. I think it could go either way.
My optimistic take is that it has a similar effect to cloud computing on solo bootstrapping. If you tried to start a SaaS company in 2005, you'd have a hard time because in addition to knowing software, you'd also have to know how to provision servers in a data center, so you didn't see a lot of one-person software success stories from that era. But then with cloud computing, it radically lowered the barrier to entry, and there were lots of one-person SaaS businesses making $1M+/yr.
So, the best case for me is if that AI increases the power of solo bootstrappers even more so if you're great at software but terrible at website design / running ads, you don't have to hire people to help you anymore, and you can achieve more by yourself.
The pessimistic outcome is that it becomes less profitable to be a bootstrapped founder because the reduced barrier to entry means you're competing with 10-100x as many people and that companies are more comfortable building in-house tools with AI rather than purchasing B2B SaaS products.[0]
I actually have a hard time imagining B2B SaaS dying because AI makes it easy to roll your own tools. I feel like even if you reduced dev cost to nearly zero, there's still headache of maintaining an app. Like, for my last business, we were paying $200/mo for HelpScout to manage support emails. If one of the devs said they spun up a reimplementation of HelpScout over the weekend that we could run for $2/mo, I'd still say no because the cost of managing it internally is at least $200/mo of people's focus.
> I actually have a hard time imagining B2B SaaS dying because AI makes it easy to roll your own tools
Agreed. I think software engineers are misunderstanding why the SaaSpocalypse is (has?) happening.
It feels like software engineers think the SaaSpocalypse is due to technical commodity: "Oh no! Claude can bang out a fully functioning Slack/Monday.com over a weekend! There goes Slack/Monday.com"
The selloff is being driven by the "Seat Replacement" fear: SaaS charges "per seat" or "per human user" - but if an agent can do the work of X (>1) humans, then "seats" sold shrink, reducing the valuation and profitability of SaaS companies that are driven by seat multiples.
This has no impact on the valuation or stress of bootstrapped businesses like yours where you don't have to answer to either VCs or shareholders. It's more likely bootstrapped businesses will get a revival as people seek to work closer with founders who are focused on building a sustainable, long term value add than an unsustainable, blitzscaling play.
In fact, if I am not mistaken, it will reduce the edge VC funded companies have over bootstrapped businesses like yours (eg: the CAC is set on a more level field when blitzscaling funds reduce or disappear).
I’ve been reading your blogs for the past 8-years.
Question: do you not have income concerns / pressures?
Please take this question from a positive place but it seems like you’ve been able to sustain years of relatively low pay (especially since you’re a father now) without concern.
I’m not sure most people can endure as long as you have and it makes me wonder if you have supplemental income not accounted for.
Not asking you to share anything you don’t feel comfortable with … and your transparency over the years has hugely influenced my thinking on should I start my own business.
Thanks for reading for so long!
> Question: do you not have income concerns / pressures?
Yes, definitely. I am a bit worried about not being able to get back to $100k+/yr in income, and I'm less confident that the safety net of "just go back to FAANG" is still available.
> I’m not sure most people can endure as long as you have and it makes me wonder if you have supplemental income not accounted for.
I do. We have investments that provide additional income. We also live in Western Massachusetts, in an area where living costs are fairly low, so we fortunately don't need to draw down much from our investments to get by.
I'd love to learn more about your process of the sale. And in your graphs, is that attributed to profit/revenue in 2024?
I'm on a super similar journey. Started in 2022, did about 400k in revenue in 2025 at 79% margin, we'll se how this year goes. Theres a world where i'd love to add a lot of scale, but that'll rely on some experiments (underway) panning out. It's 'failure' in most peoples books but 2x'ing would be great too?!
How did you find a buyer? How did you come to a sale price? Why didn't you keep going?
> I'm on a super similar journey. Started in 2022, did about 400k in revenue in 2025 at 79% margin, we'll se how this year goes. Theres a world where i'd love to add a lot of scale, but that'll rely on some experiments (underway) panning out. It's 'failure' in most peoples books but 2x'ing would be great too?!
Nice, congrats!
Yeah, I think depending on what bubble you're in, bootstrapping to 400k and 2x'ing every few years is either failure or amazing. The VC/hypergrowth path doesn't appeal to me, so I think something that gives you $100k+/yr in profit is a huge success.
> I'd love to learn more about your process of the sale.
Sure, I wrote a couple of posts with the details.[0, 1]
[0] https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
[1] https://mtlynch.io/lessons-from-my-first-exit/
Thanks for the reply. Just to clarify the picture for me, was the 2024 jump in profit attributing the sale or was that just a solid year?
Agreed on the 2x every year or two being a weird failure state. I've done both, and I'm at a junction point right now, but I really think a huge part of going all in on the VC route is finding the right money to work with. I've been mostly technical, hidden in dark places all my life. I love having the chance to be customer facing, i love the business side of my work, but doing that with the wrong backers is so unappealing i'd rather not have their money.
Edit: just skimmed your prior post (https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/). Great stuff, love the transparency!
> Thanks for the reply. Just to clarify the picture for me, was the 2024 jump in profit attributing the sale or was that just a solid year?
Mostly the sale. The deal closed in April, but Jan-March was an especially profitable quarter.[0]
[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2024/04/
Do you do podcast interviews? Would love to dig into the no-VC/hypergrowth path as that's what I'm all about.
Yep, the place where I've talked about it the most has been The Software Misadventures Podcast.[0, 1]
[0] https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/michael-lynch-on-quittin... (2022, two years into the business)
[1] https://softwaremisadventures.com/p/michael-lynch-indie-hack... (2024, just after I sold)
I think scalemaxx is offering to interview you.
Oh, I'm open to that!
Yes indeed! What's the best place to reach out?
You can email me through the address here: https://mtlynch.io/about/
I'm curious about your book journey. Sounds like having a big audience and pre-existing list really helps! How did you go about building that audience and list, and what helped the most to doing that? Which lists / audience converted the most for your book offer, and how did you promote or otherwise let folks know about your book? What was the compelling ask to pre-order a book? And, how do you plan to publish the book? Lots of book questions
> Sounds like having a big audience and pre-existing list really helps!
I didn't have a particularly big audience. I had about 2k mailing list subscribers on my main blog, but a pretty small percentage of them purchased. And I had something like 600 subscribers for the book because I've been saying I'd write it since 2021, but all I had was a mailing list.
> How did you go about building that audience and list, and what helped the most to doing that?
I haven't been focused on growing the list that much.
My main goal right now is to get feedback from readers and use it to improve the book. Once the book is done and I can't think of ways to improve it, I'll probably switch to focusing more on finding more places to find paying readers.
> Which lists / audience converted the most for your book offer
I find the most paying readers from HN, actually. I don't think it's the most in terms of conversion percentage, but it's the most in absolute terms because HN is so big. And then there are secondary effects of something doing well on HN because people share the link on other, smaller sites and social media.
> how did you promote or otherwise let folks know about your book?
The thing that's always worked best for me is writing blog posts that I hope my target audience will find interesting. So the thing that's worked for the book is adapting parts of the book to standalone blog posts and sharing those online.[0] A few of those posts did well on HN because I tried to make them interesting to developers interested in writing/blogging.[1]
> What was the compelling ask to pre-order a book?
Haha, maybe I should craft that more. It's mainly that they get to read more of whatever samples they've already hopefully found useful.
My pitch for early access is that early readers get to read it and ask me questions and help shape the book.
> And, how do you plan to publish the book?
I'm already publishing it as a PDF/epub that I sell through Stripe.
I might eventually do a print run or sell Amazon, but I hate dealing with Amazon and physical products, so I'd have to be really confident it would have a big impact on sales.
[0] https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/
[1] https://refactoringenglish.com/tools/hn-popularity/domain/?d...
I'm currently a solo bootstrapped founder, have done short stints in the past - 1 year in 2022, then became cofounder of a funded startup for a year. Now doing it again.
Question is how you stay motivated to keep at it - looks like it took about 4 years before you made similar to your Google salary, did family pressure or external pressure ever impact you? Or is it mainly just keep your eyes on the longer term goal?
I'm also quite lucky that I was aiming for lean-FIRE before I left Facebook, so I have the luxury of being able to keep at it, but sometimes it is demotivating seeing peers / others.
> Question is how you stay motivated to keep at it - looks like it took about 4 years before you made similar to your Google salary, did family pressure or external pressure ever impact you? Or is it mainly just keep your eyes on the longer term goal?
I found it helpful to go in with low expectations.
I was listening to a lot of podcasts about bootstrapping while I was still at Google in 2017-2018, and even the big success stories usually had 5+ years of failing or succeeding only marginally. So, I went in with the expectation that I'd probably fail for the first 5 years, and so there wasn't that feeling of disappointment from not earning much the first few years.
I also had a lot of lucky conditions that made it easy to take the risk at the time, including no family to support, lots of savings, low expenses.
> I'm also quite lucky that I was aiming for lean-FIRE before I left Facebook, so I have the luxury of being able to keep at it, but sometimes it is demotivating seeing peers / others.
Yeah, honestly I do sometimes think, "Wow, if I'd stayed at Google and kept getting that comp (which was about 50% equity IIRC), that would be a lot of money." But I also am very pleased with my life now, and I know I wouldn't have enjoyed my job nearly as much for the last 8 years had I stayed an employee. And that's a huge amount of my life to not do what I'd like to do.
I'm starting my journey as an indie developer, how do you keep motivated after weeks of no traction, etc.
How do you see the solo bootstrapping landscape going forward? In what ways do you see agentic coding changing things?
> How do you see the solo bootstrapping landscape going forward? In what ways do you see agentic coding changing things?
It's hard to say. I think it could go either way.
My optimistic take is that it has a similar effect to cloud computing on solo bootstrapping. If you tried to start a SaaS company in 2005, you'd have a hard time because in addition to knowing software, you'd also have to know how to provision servers in a data center, so you didn't see a lot of one-person software success stories from that era. But then with cloud computing, it radically lowered the barrier to entry, and there were lots of one-person SaaS businesses making $1M+/yr.
So, the best case for me is if that AI increases the power of solo bootstrappers even more so if you're great at software but terrible at website design / running ads, you don't have to hire people to help you anymore, and you can achieve more by yourself.
The pessimistic outcome is that it becomes less profitable to be a bootstrapped founder because the reduced barrier to entry means you're competing with 10-100x as many people and that companies are more comfortable building in-house tools with AI rather than purchasing B2B SaaS products.[0]
I actually have a hard time imagining B2B SaaS dying because AI makes it easy to roll your own tools. I feel like even if you reduced dev cost to nearly zero, there's still headache of maintaining an app. Like, for my last business, we were paying $200/mo for HelpScout to manage support emails. If one of the devs said they spun up a reimplementation of HelpScout over the weekend that we could run for $2/mo, I'd still say no because the cost of managing it internally is at least $200/mo of people's focus.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888441
> I actually have a hard time imagining B2B SaaS dying because AI makes it easy to roll your own tools
Agreed. I think software engineers are misunderstanding why the SaaSpocalypse is (has?) happening.
It feels like software engineers think the SaaSpocalypse is due to technical commodity: "Oh no! Claude can bang out a fully functioning Slack/Monday.com over a weekend! There goes Slack/Monday.com"
The selloff is being driven by the "Seat Replacement" fear: SaaS charges "per seat" or "per human user" - but if an agent can do the work of X (>1) humans, then "seats" sold shrink, reducing the valuation and profitability of SaaS companies that are driven by seat multiples.
This has no impact on the valuation or stress of bootstrapped businesses like yours where you don't have to answer to either VCs or shareholders. It's more likely bootstrapped businesses will get a revival as people seek to work closer with founders who are focused on building a sustainable, long term value add than an unsustainable, blitzscaling play.
In fact, if I am not mistaken, it will reduce the edge VC funded companies have over bootstrapped businesses like yours (eg: the CAC is set on a more level field when blitzscaling funds reduce or disappear).